


Lotor Was the Reason for Everything: A Meta on Honerva’s Motivation

by violethowler



Series: VLD Meta Analysis [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Character Analysis, Meta Essay, Nonfiction, Other, Season/Series 08 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-27 08:15:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17158478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violethowler/pseuds/violethowler
Summary: Many have complained about Honerva's motivation in Season 8 feeling like the character had undergone a "Soft Reboot".While Season 8wasa mess with the fingerprints of executive meddling all over it, when you put thought into the subtext and imagery of her backstory all the way back through season 3, Honerva being motivated by her family actually makes prefect sense.





	Lotor Was the Reason for Everything: A Meta on Honerva’s Motivation

**Author's Note:**

> Just want to make it clear before I start that the main focus of this essay is on the episode "Shadows", which, aside from the out of place flashback from Lotor's POV that was clearly supposed to happen later in the season as part of a planned redemption arc that got cut from the publicly released version of Season 8 by executive meddling, was one of the episodes that suffered from said meddling the least. I will not be getting into the subject of Honerva's final fate in this meta on the off-chance that the [petition](https://www.change.org/p/dreamworks-voltron-season-8-release-the-original-the-showrunners-wanted) to release [the unedited version of S8](https://web.archive.org/web/20181219234130/https://freevlds8.tumblr.com/post/181249037547/was-season-8-of-voltron-changed) is successful, I don't want to make conjecture about what the original ending for Honerva might have been and then turn out to be completely wrong.

Something I’ve been thinking about the last few days has been Honerva’s motivation. For several seasons her goals and motivations were shrouded in mystery. And then in Season 8, it turned out that her end goal was to find a reality where she could have a happy ending. On the surface, it feels sudden and OOC. Some have even criticized Season 8 for giving her the Soft Reboot treatment to make the story work. But looking back at previous seasons, it makes perfect sense.

Think back to “The Legend Begins”. We know from Season 5 and Season 8 that Honerva was pregnant when she and Zarkon went into the rift. But think further back in the episode. Remember that moment when Zarkon gives a Galra helmet as a gift for Baby Allura, and everyone speculated that it was supposed to be a gift for their own kid? Yeah, Lotor wasn’t Honerva and Zarkon’s first crack at conceiving a child. He was just the only one to survive. Whether their first kid died due to complications with the birth or Honerva miscarried doesn’t really matter, because the result was the same. Her pregnancy was far enough along that she and Zarkon were picking out baby gifts.

Honerva and Zarkon weren’t obsessed with the Rift _only_  for the sake of knowledge and power. Once they realized from healing Kova that Quintessence could be used medicinally, they were desperate to make sure that _this_ kid would survive. Everything they did before during and after the rift was to ensure that Lotor would survive.

Zarkon knew that Haggar was his wife. That much was clear long before Season 8 confirmed it. He clearly resented Lotor as a constant reminder of the wife that he had lost. But this was also the one thing keeping Zarkon from just killing Lotor when he started to be too much trouble. Because everything he and Honerva had sacrificed: their friends, their planet, her memory of their marriage, was to bring Lotor into this world, and if he killed the last reminder of the woman he loved, then all the atrocities he’d committed would be for nothing.

Which brings me to Honerva. Her overall plans and ambitions have always been a mystery, full of unanswered questions. What did she need all those Shiro clones for? Her attitude was always condescending to everyone around her but her husband, as if she had seen the secrets of the universe and was frustrated that the people around her just didn't get it. Her scheming behind the scenes with Operation Kuron and putting Sendak on the throne and everything else implied that her plans and machinations were bigger than keeping the empire running smoothly.  

But as soon as Lotor goes MIA in the rift she drops everything. Gone is all the research and planning and pushing ethical boundaries For Science! She throws all the resources she has in the empire to the wind and puts everything she had into bringing Lotor out of the rift. After all the speculation that she was the messenger of some dark, eldritch space god, she just drops all that and goes into grieving mother mode. 

But it makes sense. 

Because all of it had been for Lotor. Everything she had – her place in the empire, her followers, her research, and whatever potential cosmic knowledge she may or may not have glimpsed beyond the veil of death – she had because she destroyed her previous life to ensure her son survived his own birth. So of course, she was so focused on rescuing him from the rift and keeping him in her possession: because everything she had sacrificed was for nothing if she could not keep close the child she had made those sacrifices for in the first place. Her son was the reason she had all of this in the first place, so in the end none of her knowledge and research mattered if she couldn’t keep him close to her.

And when you look back at Haggar’s scenes through this lens, you realize that Honerva has been on her own journey over the course of the series. For most of the first two seasons, her character is static. She was intriguing to the audience and had a very appealing aesthetic, but she was content to serve at her husband’s side. Beyond unanswered questions about what she had planned for Shiro, we didn’t really know anything about her. It isn’t until her son returns from exile that we begin to see more of her and she begins to develop beyond “Zarkon’s second-in-command” into a more fleshed out character.

And it’s completely fitting that the more she remembers of her past, the less of a threat the Galra Empire becomes. Because the more she remembers, the less concerned she is with keeping it running. The empire could have survived without Zarkon. It could have even recovered from the infighting with _just_ Lotor gone. But without Haggar and her Druids and her Komar there to refine the Quintessence mined from conquered planets into the fuel it needed to maintain its infrastructure, the Galra Empire collapsed. We’re lead to believe that the power vacuum following Lotor’s apparent death in the rift was the cause of all the instability in Season 7, but Honerva could have easily called a Kral Zera and put Sendak on the throne without much trouble and have the empire stabilized by the time Voltron returned from the time dilation. It was her decision to sever all ties with the Empire that led to its collapse.

To sum up this whole essay, Lotor’s conception was the catalyst for everything his parents did for the next 10,000+ years, and it makes perfect sense that Honerva would abandon all her other research and leave the empire’s infrastructure to collapse in order to bring him back in whatever form she could.


End file.
